Under the auspices of the Astrophysics Datacenters Executive Committee
(ADEC), a standard was developed that allows professional papers to
link to original datasets used in those papers, and archived datasets
to link to professional papers based on those datasets. The agreement
was brokered between the datacenters, the Astrophysics Data System
(ADS), and the editors of the AAS journals. It consisted of a standard
for the definition of persistent identifiers for the archives'
datasets (AIPs) and pairing these identifiers with the "bibcodes" that
are in use in the ADS.

The identifiers conform to the International Virtual Observatory
Alliance's standard for identifiers (IVOA); i.e., they are placed in
the IVO domain, under the authority of the ADS and using the ADS's
publishers' designations. The precise definition and meaning of the
identifiers is left to the publisher, but the two main requirements
are that it will lead the user unambiguously to an AIP from which a
DIP can be retrieved, and that the identifier will be maintained in
perpetuity, even if the repository were to move. The identifiers are
currently being inserted into manuscripts on a modest scale and a
harvesting tool is still under development.

Two future developments are of great interest in connection with this
standard: certification and association.

The OCLC recently published the Criteria and Checklist for Trustworthy
Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC). It would be valuable for
the datacenters represented in ADEC to pursue TRAC status, as this
would provide a basis upon which indefinite persistence of the dataset
identifiers could be built.

It would be natural for the ADS's bibcodes to also be molded into IVOA
identifiers. Consequently, the association between papers and datasets
becomes a simple association between identifiers and the harvesting of
dataset identifier/bibcode pairs becomes a generalized harvesting of
associated identifier pairs. This simple generalization offers
immediately a mechanism to link datasets between repositories and to
harvest such associations. It has become more and more popular to
carry out coordinated or associated observations at multiple
observatories (HST, Chandra, Spitzer, XMM, Integral, VLA, MMT, Gemini,
AT, etc.), but there is no good mechanism to tie the different
components together. Being able to harvest dataset identifier pairs in
the manner described here would provide this functionality and thus
close a significant gap in information management.